At WiscNet, we often get support questions about results. “I have a 50 Mbps connection to the Internet, but when I run http://schoolspeedtest.org, the result reads 10 Mbps.” What’s unclear is where that 10 Mbps bottleneck is. In other words, the forecast high may be 50 degrees in Milwaukee, but Al Roker may be talking about Anchorage. Or San Francisco. Or Chicago. Or Atlanta. Further, it may be unseasonably warm or cool in any of those cities at that point in time. And we aren’t sure whether whether Al is talking about the daily high, daily low, average.

In other words, when measuring bandwidth, your results will vary based on geography of both your location and the testing location. A test from Madison, WI to Madison, WI is different than a test from Madison, WI to Auckland, NZ. A whole list of other factors comes into play beyond simple geography.  That’s what’s described below.

Here in our WiscNet offices, we have a 100 Mbps switch on the edge of our network. We will never go beyond that 100 Mbps on any speed test. Using Speedtest.net in Madison, we frequently get results of 93 Mbps. Internet2 in Chicago is around 85 Mbps. We’ve worked with SchoolSpeedTest.org at testing various commercial data centers including Google (65 – 75 Mbps), Rackspace (45 – 65 Mbps) and Amazon (40 – 45 Mbps). We recommend you try all three sites (Speedtest.net, Internet2, and SchoolSpeedTest.org) to begin understanding the trends.

Heads up.  The rest of this post goes the other direction.  It’s for the slightly geeky crowd that want to know more about how to measure their Internet connections and what they can do about improving their situations.

What can schools and libraries do to improve their connectivity?

Narrowing the source of bottlenecks is complicated. Not scary.  There’s good stuff to be learned here. It takes a bit of math, a little curiosity, critical thinking, and some basic troubleshooting.

1. Understanding Circuit Size – Before we get too far down the road, we need to understand what size circuit you have to the Internet.
2. Recommended Circuit Size – Recently, organizations have been researching and recommending formulas to calculate what schools need to support digital learning in schools.
3. Network Factors Influencing Performance – Understanding factors that influence performance on your local network is critical.
4. Beyond the Local Area Network Factors Influencing Performance – Once traffic leaves your network, a number of factors come into play.
5. Tips for Measuring Your Performance – Once you understand the basics, it’s time to see what you can learn about your network’s performance.

Understanding Circuit Size

The first issue is the size of your circuit. There is either a copper or fiber cable that enters your district, connecting you to the Internet. It has a device that determines the size, or capacity, of that circuit. For many in Wisconsin, this is determined by TEACH. TEACH charges Wisconsin’s schools and libraries $250/month, regardless of circuit size. TEACH buys circuits using the BadgerNet state contract rate quoted from various telecommunications providers.  Example:  A 20 Mbps circuit costs the state $2,162/month. Schools pay $250/month. TEACH makes up the cost difference with money collected from fees on phone bills, Erate discounts, and other state and federal subsidies.

TEACH calculates the amount of money available, the size of your organization, and your usage patters to determine the maximum sized circuit you will receive. A small library may be given a 3 Mbps circuit ($904/month – $250/month). A large school district may have a 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) circuit ($11,652/month – $250/month). Typical increments include 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 50 Mbps, and 100 Mbps. If you have an 11 Mbps circuit, rock on.

Recommended Circuit Size

Our recommendation, based on research done by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) and the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, is that all schools have a 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) connection per 1000 users by 2017. SETDA further recommends that the connections between the buildings within a school district be connected at 10 Gbps (10,000 Mbps).

Our experience watching schools go from 5 Mbps to 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps is that they quickly fill the maximum capacity of these pipes. Schools are shifting to cloud based services such as Google Apps and encouraging students and staff to bring devices from home. In the next few years, these numbers will need to grow to accommodate student information system, financial systems, library systems, online testing systems, and online professional development. This is in addition to the teaching, learning, and general operations your network is supporting along the way.

Most school districts in Wisconsin range in size from 800 to 1200 students, thus, they should be thinking roughly 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) to support their infrastrucutre needs. Unfortunately, few have more than 100 Mbps, or 1/10th of what’s recommended to support where we are going.

Network Factors Influencing Performance

The next step is a bit more complicated. You want to get a sense the size of your circuit compared to the actual speed of wherever it is on the Internet your are grabbing information from. This is where a variety of speed test applications come into play. Say you have a 100 Mbps circuit. You may see results anywhere from 4 Mbps to 95 Mbps depending on a number of factors. Files hosted in Google’s data centers will be quick compared to those hosted on Joe’s home network. If the host’s Internet service provider only has 5 Mbps available and you have a 100 Mbps, will will not get more than 5 Mbps.

More on that later.  Let’s start with conditions on your local area network.

Congested Local Area Network: If you have a ton of traffic on your local area network, your results will vary. There are spikes in traffic in the morning, at noon, right at the end of school, and even the beginning of each class period as folks check email, take attendance, browse, and gather teaching materials. A lab full of students using Google Earth will also cause a similar spike.

Web Filter/Proxy Server/Caching Server/Switches/Routers/Firewalls: If all of your internet traffic is being checked as it comes and goes from your network, your results hinge on that servers ability to check and move the traffic. A 100 Mbps circuit that passes through a Windows 98 based web filter with a 10 Mb ethernet card is leaving 90 Mbps+ to waste. While that’s an extreme example, it’s worth putting a bit of thought into the throughput capacity of the devices sitting on the edges of your network. Network monitoring and management appliances, while nice and sometimes necessary, cause a performance hit on your Internet connection.

Faulty Cabling: Bad cabling? Remember when we use to bring kids and parents in to pull cable in our schools? It may be time to rethink your wiring.

Beyond the Local Area Network Factors Influencing Performance

There are a variety of free, web based tools to test your Internet connection speed through your local area network and beyond. It’s like searching for clip art online. Equally convenient and maddening.

Browser-based speed testing applications will download and upload a batch of files, do a few calculations based on time, and display results.  Proximity is an important factor in determining results.  Other things being equal, you will have better results the closer the files are hosted.  Network congestion, server load, broken links, and many other factors come into play the further away these files are hosted.

We recommend WiscNet members start with the Internet2 speed test application. It runs on a beefy server sitting on a 1 Gbps connection. You can test against servers at various locations in Chicago, Atlanta, and New York. These options should be the best and most accurate results for members of WiscNet. These tests also help identify the slowest link in the end-to-end path of the test. Say the client computer you are testing from is connected to a rusty, 10 Mb hub. The Internet2 test will help identify the fact that you are getting 9 Mbps and you need to upgrade that hub.

SpeedTest.net is a service that anybody can use from anywhere to anywhere. There are a few factors to take into consideration. First, you know nothing about the Internet connectivity the speed test server has to the Internet. If they are connected to the Internet via a 50 Mbps cable modem and you have a 100 Mbps connection, your results won’t come back at more than 50 Mbps. Second, the test is crossing many networks along the way, each with their own factors. While your network may be speedy, you have little control once those packets start bouncing across the Internet, trying to test against some guy’s server on another guy’s network. Finally, if you’ve ever tried running a trace route, you understand that traffic hops from point to point, across various networks, based on what the Internet sees as the fastest possible route. A test run at different times of the day may end up taking different routes and produce different results.

Here in Wisconsin, the DPI is encouraging schools to test their bandwidth with SchoolSpeedTest.org. SchoolSpeedTest.org tests, tracks, and reports results to determine connection speeds. This will give the DPI data to assess the infrastructure readiness for online testing.  SchoolSpeedTest.org is hosted with Amazon Web Service’s “Cloudfront” service, thus, results from these tests are influenced a) by which of the various Amazon data centers to test runs to and b) by the traffic in, around, and between Amazon’s data centers. Our results using SchoolSpeedTest.org generally run 50% – 60% less than what we get from Internet2 Chicago and SpeedTest.net’s Madison server locations.

Tips for Measuring Network Performance

1. Try various speed test applications, from various locations on your network, to various geographic areas, at various times of the day. You should begin to see some trends.
2. Troubleshoot. You will get a variety of results that require a bit of testing and troubleshooting. Are the results consistent? Why or why not? Can you identify issues on your local network? Might factors such as the time of day be playing a factor?
3. WiscNet members can view hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly trends of traffic coming into and out of their networks at http://my.wiscnet.net/graphs. These graphs show what’s happening right at the edge of your network.
4. Our technical support folks love to help. It’s what we do. Email support@wiscnet.net or call (608) 265-6761 x 2.

Learn more about how to monitor your network’s performance and how to go about upgrading your circuit. Talk with Jim Young jyoung@wiscnet.net (608) 265-6761 x 2 here at WiscNet about your options. He’s able to point you in the right direction based on your usage, geography, needs, and budget.

Community Area Networks (CANs) are high-speed broadband networks for community organizations. CANs provide the network infrastructure that connects schools, libraries, healthcare facilities, educational institutions and governmental organizations within a community. These networks promote innovation, competition and economic viability through advanced fiber connections that provide fast, uncongested network access. CANs are owned and operated by the pooled technical staff within the various institutions, keeping costs down and allowing the freedom to grow and innovate.

The Waukesha CAN, dubbed “WECAN”, currently connects Carroll University, Waukesha County Technical College (WCTC), Waukesha Public Schools and the City of Waukesha to one another and to the Internet.

On August 30th, WECAN finished work on a new fiber-optic connection giving each organization a 1 Gigabit connection to the Internet. Steve Schlomann, Chief Information Officer for the School District of Waukesha, compares this upgrade to “opening a 10 lane freeway where we once had a single lane road.”

Through this new network, each WECAN organization has ample bandwidth resources that allow them to take advantage of the latest technological advances in education and business. John Arechavala, Director of IT Infrastructure Services at Carroll University, has already observed immediate benefits resulting from the new high-speed connection. Arechavala describes cloud-based applications that are far more reliable and responsive and students and staff that are excited that they can now communicate nationally and internationally through Skype without delays or interruptions.

Members of WECAN credit the collaborative nature of the network for saving money and increasing efficiencies. All WECAN members share in the cost and contribute resources making what would typically be financially impossible as an individual organization, now affordable through collaboration.

WECAN is “a shining example of what can be achieved when partnerships are formed for the good of all concerned; helping organizations reach goals that would be impossible or impractical alone,” describes Doug Uhl, IT Infrastructure Manager at WCTC.

WECAN’S INCEPTION
WECAN began in 2011 with conversations and connections between two local colleges:  WCTC and Carroll University.

“Both colleges needed bandwidth resources to power leading edge technologies such as Virtual Desktop, Video Conferencing, Streaming Video, Cloud Computing and other instructional and business needs that could only be achieved affordably through this collaboration,” explains Uhl.

Together WCTC and Carroll University worked with external partners including Avaya, CableCom LLC, Champion ONE, Midwest Fiber Networks and WiscNet to design and build the initial fiber network in 2011.

More recently, the School District of Waukesha and the City of Waukesha also joined WECAN. The school district and city worked with CableCom LLC, Cisco, Heartland Business Systems, Multimedia Communications and Engineering of Green Bay and WiscNet to build and leverage their connection. With the addition of these members, the network, which was intentionally designed to allow other local institutions to easily join and share in the benefits, is currently being shared by four organizations with intentions to continue growing.

LOOKING AHEAD
The vision for WECAN is much larger and far reaching than its current implementation and is being built in phases to reach all of Waukesha County. WECAN’s goal is to continue to add members and bandwidth, while lowering costs through shared resources and collaboration making it, as Uhl describes, “A true win for everyone who participates.”

WECAN has plans for an even more diverse population of partners and applications including shared or reciprocal disaster recovery sites and hosted application sharing.

“The beauty and design of WECAN is to allow members to individually and jointly vision and design applications and services without concern about bandwidth,” says Uhl.

The completion of the Gigabit connection doesn’t finish the network; rather it’s one piece of the original vision and establishes a foundation for growth. While the project is far from over, the WECAN members are excited about the accomplishments thus far.

“This is a great example of cooperation that has allowed us to expand our connection speed at a reasonable cost,” explains Schlomann. “We are all very excited about this milestone!”

Printable Version

“We connect communities in new and innovative ways. We connect major universities with technical colleges, libraries, and K12 schools, making us a 21st century education powerhouse. We are actively bridging the divide between the public and private sectors,” said David Lois, WiscNet’s Executive Director. “We will help grow more networks, connect more people, and create new services that support the WiscNet community.”

WiscNet will be making changes to address legislative challenges prohibiting the University of Wisconsin from being a member of WiscNet as of July 2013. While this poses a few challenges, it opens a number of new opportunities to strengthen the WiscNet community.

Ross Wilson, the WiscNet Board of Directors Chairperson, reminds us, “Always look for opportunities to redefine ‘we’.” WiscNet, and, by extension, “we”, will have much more flexibility in working with private entities, like Packerland Broadband and CCI Systems, in expanding community area networks in communities like La Crosse, Fond du Lac, and the Chippewa Valley. WiscNet is also excited about opportunities to partner with organizations throughout Wisconsin’s business, healthcare, and manufacturing communities, all of which recognize the importance of advanced networks to our economy.  Finally, serving higher education is in our DNA.  We have full intentions of serving Wisconsin’s higher education advanced research and education networking needs into the future.

WiscNet’s focus throughout this transition will be to make a stronger WiscNet community. In the upcoming months, partner organizations including the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), Wisconsin Library Association (WLA), Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators (WASDA), and Wisconsin Educational Media and Technology Association (WEMTA) have invited us to discuss our plans at their annual conferences. We appreciate these, and other, opportunities to connect with others in the WiscNet community.

Jon Tanner, Technology Director for Oregon School District, will shift our focus to the next few years rather than the next 88 years. Please join us for the next webinar in our Third Thursday series when Jon will identify several key K12 educational technology trends and how they are being implemented or incorporated into technology plans in forward-thinking schools.

Please join us on Thursday, September 20th from 2:00 – 2:45 pm when Jon will inform, provoke thought, entertain and provide useful tools and resources that can drive innovation in your school district.

Missed the session? Visit http://wisc.adobeconnect.com/p5sgsi7nv3q/ to view an archive!

WiscNet is currently undergoing changes that will not only move WiscNet forward, but also continue supporting WiscNet’s record-breaking growth. These changes include positioning WiscNet to serve the University of Wisconsin as a possible customer, rather than a member, and separating WiscNet’s fiscal, accounting, human resources and procurement functions from the University of Wisconsin. As a result of being freed from institutional bureaucracies, WiscNet will experience new flexibilities that benefit the entire WiscNet community. WiscNet will continue to remain a reliable and innovative resource today and well into the future. While change has been our recent focus, we’re directing our focus back to WiscNet’s Strategic Plan 2016 and growing more members, networks, and services for the WiscNet community.

WiscNet recently approved 17 new members, growing the total number of WiscNet members to 496. WiscNet membership permits access to a growing set of member-designed educational services. It also allows collaboration among neighboring institutions by building an educational community owned and democratically controlled by our members. Most importantly, membership connects people.

“We’ve used the phrase ‘Grow Smart’ for several years, most importantly to describe our unlimited usage network pricing model and to signal our collective challenge to push the network harder to produce new and innovative results,” said WiscNet’s Executive Director David Lois. “We cannot be satisfied with what we have done and we must keep pushing and go further as our members will need more services, more advanced technology, and more tools.”

About WiscNet

WiscNet is an independent, 501c3 member organization founded by Wisconsin’s higher education institutions in 1990. WiscNet provides research and education services to public and private higher education, K12 school districts, libraries, municipalities, and hospitals throughout Wisconsin. We connect people and strategies to solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in support of their educational, research, and community service missions. For more information, visit http://www.wiscnet.net.

Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/wiscnet
Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/wiscnet

10 Rules for Students and Teachers (and Life) by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent | Brain Pickings.

The Wisconsin Educational Communications Board (ECB) is excited to share two big announcements! Not only have we spent the summer licensing PK-12 classroom resources that align with Common Core State Standards and are available at no cost to Wisconsin educators, but we’re also in the process of redesigning the “look” and name of our Ed Division. Wisconsin educators can catch a first glance of our 2012-2013 programs as well as our rebranding next week as newly designed posters arrive at every school and public library!

We’ll fully launch the fresh identity this fall but in the meantime the new poster, also available online at WIMediaLab.org, serves as a quick reference guide to all of our vetted resources including interactive websites and streaming video.

Keep doing great work.

“We’ve used the phrase ‘Grow Smart’ for several years, most importantly to describe our unlimited usage network participation pricing model and to signal our collective challenge to push the network harder to produce new and innovative results,” said WiscNet’s Executive Director David Lois. “We cannot be satisfied with what we have done and we must keep pushing and go further as our members will need more services, more advanced technology, and more tools.”

WiscNet is proud to be a membership organization. WiscNet membership permits access to a growing set of member-designed and member-governed educational services and also allows collaboration among neighboring institutions in building an educational community that is owned and democratically controlled by our members. Most importantly, membership connects people.

Among the K12 member organizations joining WiscNet this summer: Butternut School District, Clinton Community School District, DC Everest Area School District, Kettle Moraine Lutheran High School, Little Chute Area School District, Neenah Joint School District, Port Edwards School District, Richmond School District, Seymour Community School District, School District of Waukesha, and Westby Area School District. Furthermore, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Wisconsin Department of Transportation, City of Waukesha, City of La Crosse, La Crosse County, and the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee have also become members of WiscNet.

“WiscNet is currently undergoing changes that will not only move WiscNet forward, but also continue supporting WiscNet’s record-breaking growth. These changes include positioning WiscNet to serve UW as a possible customer, rather than a member, and separating WiscNet’s fiscal, accounting, human resources and procurement functions from the UW. As a result of being freed from institutional bureaucracies, WiscNet will experience new entrepreneurial flexibilities that benefit the WiscNet community,” said Ross Wilson, Chairperson of the WiscNet Board of Directors. “WiscNet will continue to remain a reliable and innovative resource today and well into the future. While change has been our recent focus, we’re directing our focus back to WiscNet’s Strategic Plan 2016 and growing more networks for Wisconsin.”

About WiscNet

WiscNet is an independent, 501c3 member organization founded by Wisconsin’s higher education institutions in 1990. WiscNet provides research and education services to public and private higher education, K12 school districts, libraries, municipalities, and hospitals throughout Wisconsin. We connect people and strategies to solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in support of their educational, research, and community service missions.

Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/wiscnet
Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/wiscnet

Building Bolder Schools: It doesn’t hurt to be first: Steve Dembo at TEDxCorpusChristi – YouTube.

I’m Curt Rees and I am an elementary school principal in the School District of Onalaska on the west coast of Wisconsin. There are many challenges and opportunities in being an elementary school principal, but what I love the most about my school and district is the chance to make connections with kids and their families over the many years they are in my school. When I was an elementary teacher, I loved the close-knit family environment that would develop within my classroom for that year. As an elementary principal, I get to develop relationships with kids and families over the course of many years. It’s great to see how much kids progress over the 6 years they are in my school.

Aside from my principal duties, I’m also working on a Ph. D. from the University of Kentucky in Education Sciences with a specialization in School Technology Leadership. I have taught graduate course for the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse helping practicing teachers earn their Masters degree in Professional Development. I also teach 4th and 5th grade Sunday school.

When I’m not doing something education related, I spend a lot of time with my wife, who is a professor of health education at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, and our two kids. You can also find me stalking trout on the streams of Southwest Wisconsin.

What’s in your bag?

Let me tell you about the bag itself as I love backpacks. It is an awesome Thule Crossover pack, with a nice secure sleeve for my laptop and plenty of organized pockets for all the other gear I carry (plenty of highlighters, black Ticonderoga pencils, and post-its). My computer is a 15” MacBook Proma with a purple snap-on Speck cover (go Ona Hilltoppers!). I love how Apple products work so well together, so I also carry an iPhone 4 and will stand in line for an iPhone 5 when they come out.

My most used iPhone apps are Twitter (find me @WiscPrincipal), OmniFocus (keeps me very organized), and Instagram (keeps me very entertained and helps me develop a more creative side). On my MacBook I absolutely love OmmWriter for brainstorming ideas and writing. It’s a moderately simple text editor with minimal visual distractions and a cool ambient music/noise feature. I keep all my documents organized and secure in Google Drive and then also back up to my 3TB Time Capsule at home. You Tube is always good for a few laughs, but I have also been using it the past year as a communication avenue with the parents at my school. Many of them don’t have the availability to come to school to interact with our staff, but You Tube has been a great way to put positive faces/voices to our names and share information with parents.

Who or what has your attention these days?

Other people’s thinking is what often has my attention. I like to learn the details of why people do what they do. Twitter works well to establish surface connections with other people, but I really enjoy listening to podcasts to get inside what others are doing and thinking. I am a regular listener of the Shifted Learning podcast, but also learn a lot from This American Life, TeacherCast, and Eduleadership Radio. Blogs/sites that really hold my attention are BigThink, Game Theorist (Joshua Gans), and Geek Dad (from Wired Magazine).

I love tech gadgets, but don’t use an ereader device, because I still enjoy holding a real book. My recent reads have been Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer, The UltraMind Solution by Dr. Mark Hyman, Too Big to Know by David Weinberger, and Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky.